EMAIL MARKETING
Optimizing your Email Marketing Plan for More Clicks
Email marketing drives $38 for every $1 invested in it. Are your campaigns generating $38 for every $1 invested? Check out this blog for strategies for increasing the click rate of your email campaigns.
What?
Email Marketing?
Still really? You must be joking.
Even in this social media world?
I found this graphic on the internet, which compares the volume of the email sent to the numbers of posts shared on different social media platforms.
The rice grains in the bowl represent the volume of content shared on email. By comparison, the size of the content on Facebook is equivalent to 10 grains, and that of Twitter is only 4. All of this to tell you that Email Marketing is still there and isn’t going to go anywhere soon. None of the present social media channels can do what an Email can do.
Email can:
- Be directly sent at the time when it is most relevant to the recipient.
- Be sent with Content/Products which are personalized to the needs of the recipient.
- Track the individual recipient engagement.
- Be easily Automated and do the follow-up.
I love social media, but one of the big keys that email has over other channels is that it gets read, it gets delivered. So on average, we see 20 or 25, sometimes even 30% open rates in email marketing. Compare that to the 10% read rate you see in social media, that too if we have a reasonable budget. Social platforms kill the organic reach for more and more companies to buy their ads.
This is, according to a study from Adobe. Email is still the winner here. It’s the consumers’ preference that, from their brands, they get this stuff by email, because then they can read it when they’re ready. And it’s pretty far ahead of some of the other channels.
According to Litmus, email marketers in the industry, email marketing drives $38 for every $1 invested in it, meaning 3800% return on investment.
The four most important metrics to measure while running an email campaign are:
- Open Rates (Views)
- Clicks
- Bounce Rate
- Return
In my opinion, the number of clicks on your CTA is more critical than the number of people who open your email. This is because only then would an email do its job of bringing customers to your website.
I am going to share some strategies which would help increase the number of clicks on email campaigns. There are some things you should avoid, and some plans that just rock or light up your campaigns. I’ll try my best to help you make 38 dollars for your 1 dollar investment.
Strategies You Should Follow for increasing your Click Rates.
- Your subscribers should opt-in and shouldn’t be auto opted in.
Getting someone to sign up for your email should be a thing that they wanted. It shouldn’t be like, I got your email address through a business card or found the business card at a dropbox, and you think this is a person you should do business with.
Make sure when someone is on your mailing list it is because they opted in. They permitted you to send emails through an act of option. This generally comes when you provide them value. Values could be ebooks, coupons, slides of the presentation, a free trial of the software you’ve created, and the very least an ongoing subscription of your newsletter.
2. Have A Plan
What I mean here is have a content marketing calendar, a content marketing plan. And this is your email, yes, but it should align with how you’re rolling out pieces of content. If you’ve got a new blog post or a new YouTube video coming out at specific time intervals, time your emails. Do this so that you can release that new content to the people who have asked to receive it in their inbox. It’s essential to have an integration between your social and email campaigns.
3. Set expectations on Value, Frequency, and Security
You should upfront set expectations on the frequency of the emails. If it’s going to be daily, you should say that right up front, because that’s pretty intense. You want to make sure people are opting in for that. Then comes in the Security, you should tell them that we’re not going to sell, trade or rent your email address to any third party. They have signed up for updates coming from your company, and they will only get those.
Strategies You Should NOT Follow for increasing your Click Rates.
- Don’t start from scratch.
If you or the person running your email campaign thinks that every Tuesday they will write an email for it, they will exhaust themselves pretty quickly. Make sure that your emails are made up of content from your blog, your best performing social stuff, especially great juicy videos. Anything that you’ve explicitly recorded or recently written to be a campaign that lights up, make sure you’re putting that in your emails as well. It can be an excellent content plan for email.
2. Don’t use just one big image or a bunch of small ones.
All of your content shouldn’t be just in one big image or even in the cluster of small pictures. This is how your email looks when images are turned off.
For about any version of Outlook, and some versions of Android, they’re not going to load images or images are going to load slowly on slow connections. So your customers are going to see nothing, none of that excellent copy, none of the calls to action.
The other problem that email can’t scale on a mobile device. So on 300 pixels wide, the copy on that button is hard to read, the paragraph copy is impossible to read. So none of that can resize on a mobile device.
Finally, I am going to share some awesome tricks that could skyrocket your email marketing campaign.
- Sell through pre-header
And the big thing I want to get across here is pre-headers can do a pretty heavy lift. They can know about the offer without actually opening the email. The pitch has been made. This can help lift things like maybe they don’t open the email, but they see a paid media ad somewhere else on the web. We know that this subject line and preheader working well together is going to help our open rates. We see that it’s going to drive engagement with the email itself.
2. Don’t just sell it. Tell stories
In my opinion, the most significant recommendation that social media has given us in email marketing is: we have a platform, we have a forum, and we have permission to tell stories with our subscribers. And if you don’t think you have stories, I beg to differ, everyone has a story to tell.
There is a lot of other do’s and don’ts one can follow for improving their email campaign. One can also go and read various blogs by CXL Institute for the same.
A quick recap of what we have discussed in the above blog
- Advantages of Email Marketing
- Essential Metrics to measure in an Email Campaign
- Strategies You Should Follow for increasing your Click Rates.
- Strategies You Should NOT Follow for increasing your Click Rates.
- Some Strategies which could skyrocket your Email Campaign.
Want to know more about email marketing, design campaigns that could help you increase the ROI from your email campaigns? Connect with me over Linkedin at Shreyansh Goel or email me at shreyanshgoel16@gmail.com.
